SBIR Phase II: Ecosystem Design Tool

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛/商业影响是使受空气污染和极端高温影响的社区能够以快速和经济高效的方式设计和实施解决这些问题的解决方案。空气污染增加了癌症、中风、心脏病和呼吸道感染的风险，并可能在阿尔茨海默氏症和糖尿病中发挥作用，导致人类痛苦和全球每年数万亿美元的医疗费用。极端高温是额外的医疗保健担忧和成本的日益增长的来源。这些成本由保险公司、政府、企业和公民承担。通过精心放置树木可以减少空气污染。这些树还通过遮阳和蒸发水分来减少极端的热量。通过有针对性的树木放置工程，有可能改善人类健康。该项目将开发分析和设计工具，以帮助这种植树，以最低的成本和最短的时间，产生最大可能的健康和财务效益。当地企业可以使用这个工具来确保他们得到公平的报酬，因为他们减少了医疗保险公司、政府和污染制造者的医疗费用负担，同时使社区和环境更具弹性。而现有的文献表明，树木可能提供一种有效的空气污染和热岛缓解策略。寻求实施这类战略的利益攸关方需要工具来确保种植尽可能有效。现有的规划工具不具有足够的分辨率或场地针对性，而且往往不采用基于证据的设计策略。该项目将对各种社区进行高分辨率的植被分析。这些数据将被用来训练一套算法，从广泛可用的低成本数据流中推断出高分辨率的植被特性。这些推断的植被指标将与地理空间生态系统设计自动化管道集成，以创建一个软件工具。该软件工具将为环境正义社区、生态系统设计师、健康保险公司、政府和当地企业提供实施成本效益高的生态系统干预措施的能力，并提供可量化的空气质量和热岛效益。这些福利可以用来计算财务健康福利。由于效益量化将基于正在进行的验证和监测项目，该工具可用于利用私人融资来改善公共健康和改善环境。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to enable communities impacted by air pollution and extreme heat to design and implement solutions to these problems in a fast and cost-effective way. Air pollution increases the risk of cancer, stroke, heart-disease, and respiratory infections, and may play a role in Alzheimer’s and diabetes, resulting in human suffering and trillions of dollars of health care costs globally each year. Extreme heat is a growing source of additional health-care concerns and costs. These costs are shouldered by insurance companies, governments, businesses, and citizens. Air pollution can be reduced by carefully placed trees. These trees also reduce extreme heat by shading and evaporation of water. There is potential for improving human health via targeted engineering of tree placements. This project will develop analysis and design tools to help with such tree plantings to generate the maximum possible health and financial benefits, at the lowest cost and with the shortest timelines. Local businesses can use this tool to make sure that they get paid fairly for reducing health care cost burdens of health insurance companies, governments, and pollution producers, while making communities and the environment more resilient.While existing literature indicates that trees may provide an effective air pollution and heat-island mitigation strategy. Stakeholders seeking to implement such strategies need tools to ensure that the plantings are as effective as possible. Existing planning tools are not of sufficient resolution or site specific, and often do not employ evidence-based design strategies. This project will perform high resolution vegetation analysis on a wide variety of neighborhoods. This data will be used to train a set of algorithms to infer high resolution vegetation properties from widely available, low-cost data streams. These inferred vegetation metrics will be integrated with a geospatial ecosystem design automation pipeline to create a software tool. The software tool will provide environmental justice communities, ecosystem designers, health insurance companies, governments, and local businesses with the ability to implement cost-effective ecosystem interventions with quantifiable air quality and heat island benefits. These benefits can be used to calculate financial health benefits. Because the benefits quantification will be based on ongoing validation and monitoring projects, the tool can be used to leverage private financing for improving public health and improving the environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.